The Beat of the Music

My little brother Mike and I were raised in a trailer park located in the teeming metropolis of Wrights CornersNew York - population 40. Not everyone can boast of singlehandedly increasing the population of their birthtown by 2.5%, but that was our accomplishment simply by being born.

Funny, living in a trailer we never
thought of ourselves as white trash; unlike most of our farmer neighbors (great folks, by the way), we didn't have to use an outhouse and we didn't have to pump our own water - we had indoor plumbing!

Needless to say, with an alcoholic mother and alcoholic step-father, bent each night on getting
fucked up and fucking each other up (and us if we got in the way) family life wasn't that great.

Mike and I spent a lot of time running away from home.

Living in a rural environment, we'd naturally head straight for the woods. And when The Asshole came looking for us, we'd hide in our most secret hidden fort. It would usually take the State Troopers three or four days to find us.

Even though we'd have to eat whatever we could find out there (not impossible for hicks like us, by the way)
we'd get some peace until we were caught and they took us back to the trailer.

This all happened in the mid 1960's, right when the consumer culture was begining to take hold in the States.

Unlike the kids of today, we didn't have to wear the right jeans or the right sneakers to school - being clothed was enough.

Its been too long to remember the names of the stations or the Disk Jockeys, and they aren't the subject of this write up, but when things got fucked at
home - which was most every night - and when we'd finally had enough of getting the shit kicked out of us, we'd drop out a bedroom window,
and head for our fort in the woods.

And most of these broadcasts were live, so we usually would hear the crowd in between songs; "Whoooo!", "Frank Zappa man",
"Keith is a fucking god" , "Louder, faster", and "more more more more more more".

We agreed with many of the comments, but never could understand why sometimes the crowd would complain about the pace or volume of the music;
there was nothing that my brother and I wanted more than to get away from that fucking trailer and Wrights Corners and to be at one of these wonderful live shows.

Clubs like Pyramid and CBGBs had live music seven nights a week, sometimes for as little as $5. I had a ball, at times seeing bands every night of the week. But I never failed to relate these experiences with my little brother. And he had some wonderful live shows to tell me
about also!

Three and one half years ago I moved to London; another fantastic place for live music.

But no matter where Mike and I were, we would always talk about music, groups and albums; it was our shared connection, a reminder of the bad
times past.

Talking about music implicitly gave us relevance on how far we'd come since we were kids. Without saying so, we knew that no mattter how bad things seemed now, as long as we had food to eat, a roof over our heads and music it just couldn't be that bad. The radio and the fort were long past us.

But Mike can't listen to the music anymore, having passed away a few years ago after a long struggle with cancer.

So I listen to the music for him.

Every year, on his birthday, I put CDs on his grave. Hot fresh stuff that I know he'd love. And I still go to see bands.

Just last night I went to a free show held a local pub and featuring a young group of blokes, probably none of them older than twenty.

They gave it their best, doing covers of The Clash, The Stones and The Who, pretty much any group with guitars. Sweating, smiling, exhausted, fingers raw from hitting the strings so fast, they were probably doing one hundred and ten beats per minute.

I had a few pints, and thought it was great!

But after every song the cries were remarkably like what we used to hear on the radio over thirty years ago: "Faster, louder, more, more, more, more".